


an allegory of all the things we could've been

by iwaoiks



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Haikyuu!! Manga Spoilers, Historical Inaccuracy, M/M, Pining, death happens but it's never the end, the works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23546038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iwaoiks/pseuds/iwaoiks
Summary: “They say,” Oikawa begins, running long fingers down Iwaizumi’s spine, “that when two people are destined to be lovers, the Gods bind them together with an invisible red cord.” Iwaizumi raises a brow, conjuring only vague recollections of such a story told by his mother, but does not interrupt. Oikawa continues, “No matter how far apart they are, no matter how long it takes, they’ll always find each other. In this life or the next.”Outside, the moon is just beginning to slip from the sky. Iwaizumi brushes Oikawa’s hair behind his ear, quiet and pensive, before he reaches out for Oikawa’s hand. Their fingers slot against each other, a perfect fit, and Iwaizumi brings their hands closer to his mouth. He presses his lips to Oikawa’s knuckles. In the light of the retreating moon, Iwaizumi thinks that Oikawa looks ephemeral.“I don’t know anything about some red string,” Iwaizumi murmurs into the cracks of Oikawa’s skin, “or even about lifetimes or fate. But no matter where you are, I’ll find you. Gods or otherwise.”[or: Iwaizumi and Oikawa make a promise they intend to keep.]
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Comments: 78
Kudos: 324
Collections: Iwaoi Brainrot





	an allegory of all the things we could've been

**Author's Note:**

> give [elo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatal/pseuds/fatal)'s [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2PjLVjvdJS8ChOdL5fxpKp?si=OTh96ZNRQBmigXQUpqsOSA) for this fic a listen! There are manga spoilers ahead, so be warned.

**I.**

Oikawa’s first experience with death goes just like so: it is a fine spring morning, his mother cooking breakfast by the _irori_ , his father already off to the paddy fields. Oikawa is 6 years old and has just woken from his slumber, tiny hand rubbing at barely-open eyes. The first thing he does that morning, just like every other morning, is walk down the hall to awaken Kuro-chan, the Oikawa household’s resident cat. It’s part of his daily routine, waking Kuro-chan, before the two would head for breakfast and spend their day playing together in his mother’s garden (which is really just a small patch of earth behind their home, but full of life all the same). Oikawa doesn’t like to admit it, but Kuro-chan is his one and only friend.

He finds the cat sleeping by the _genkan_ , where he usually is in the mornings. Oikawa crouches down next to him. When he pokes the creature with his index finger, Kuro-chan does not move. When he lifts him in his tiny hands, a sure-fire way of waking Kuro-chan up, the black cat does not stir.

There are many things young Oikawa doesn’t know, but he knows dread when he feels it, even if he cannot name it. And that’s exactly what he feels when he shakes Kuro-chan’s body frantically, the feeling weighing heavy in the pit of his stomach. Panic rises in his throat. Oikawa drops the cat, and runs.

He runs, runs, runs as far as his legs can take him. Out the door, past the edge of the village, into the woods he goes. His heart thumps hard, hard against his chest; everything blurs in his periphery, a mixture of shadows that only makes him go faster, barely keeping up with the panic of his heart.

Oikawa is 6 years old when he runs away from home, runs away from the unmoving black body of his pet cat Kuro-chan, runs away from the heavy, thick, sloshing feeling in the pit of his stomach. He doesn’t know how far he runs, or for how long, just keeps going as the woods grow thicker and darker around him, the trees leering, branches reaching out to lash at his skin.

He doesn’t think of stopping until he does, when the blur of dark green and brown of the woods opens suddenly to a bright, brilliant ocean of blue. Oikawa stops dead in his tracks, almost tripping over himself, but when he looks up he feels a different kind of breathless than that of physical exertion. All around him, blue flowers sprout from the earth, covering the clearing with life. Sunlight beams from above and basks everything around him with a golden glow. Ahead, he sees the glitter of a pond’s surface, tranquil and untouched. Oikawa cannot seem to catch his breath, the thick weight in his gut replaced by something lighter, something else he cannot name.

“ _Wasurenagusa_ ,” someone says from behind him, and Oikawa jumps in his skin, turning quickly to look at the owner of the voice. A boy about his age stands just at the edge of the clearing, where the tops of the tall trees have stopped collecting the sun and the light falls on his face, unobstructed. He’s about as tall as Oikawa is, tan skin glittering in the light, hair black and spiky. Their eyes meet. Oikawa feels something like a shiver reach for his spine, but it doesn’t quite get a hold of it. “Forget-me-nots. That’s what they’re called,” the boy says, neither loud nor quiet, his voice clear in the air between them. “My mother plants them in her garden.”

Oikawa blinks at the boy, once, then again. He can hear his heart beating in his chest, a loud _thud thud thud_ against the walls, and wonders if the boy can hear it, too. Then he turns his back to him and crouches down, a hand outstretched to the ground. His fingers, stubby and soft with childhood, brush against the petals of a flower, and Oikawa lets out a slow, slow breath.

“They’re pretty,” he says, and somehow without looking he knows the boy nods behind him. Oikawa begins to feel the swell of tears in his eyes, but does nothing to stop them. They roll quietly down his cheeks in fat, endless streams, and Oikawa makes neither a move nor a sound. The flowers sway in the wind.

He hears the rustle of grass from behind him, and the boy appears in his periphery. Oikawa looks up through his silent flow of tears, mouth twisted in a frown, and sees that the boy has his hand outstretched towards him. The sun is shining upon his back.

“I’m Iwaizumi Hajime,” he says, earnest and solid.

A moment passes. Oikawa looks at him, eyes wide with a wonder for things he is yet to know; then he wipes his tears roughly on his cotton sleeves, and takes Iwaizumi’s hand.

Something in the air shifts. Fate starts feeling breathless, too.

“I’m Oikawa Tooru,” he says, and Iwaizumi pulls him to his feet.

Oikawa is 6 years old when he runs away from home for all of 23 minutes, and returns quietly with a tingling in his hand that does not cease. His mother looks at him knowingly as he walks through the door, and when it is time to say goodbye to their recently deceased pet cat, Oikawa no longer runs. They bury him by the camellias his mother plants in her garden, murmuring prayers, and Oikawa’s mother gently pats his head and lets him have some extra dessert for dinner.

That night, just as the sun begins to set, Oikawa settles himself in his mother’s arms, eyes heavy with dreams and the ache that comes after crying. She hums, an old lullaby he could never catch the words to, and Oikawa feels himself start to fall asleep. “Death, my darling,” she says quietly as Oikawa loses the last remnants of his consciousness, one hand stroking his hair, “is never the end.”

Iwaizumi waits. It’s still rather early in the morning, sunlight soft and forgiving against his skin. So early, in fact, that even his mother had looked at him all quizzical, watching with a quirked eyebrow as he slipped into his shoes by the _genkan_ this morning. “Where are you off to, Hajime?” she’d asked, endlessly bemused by her son’s restless disposition. Iwaizumi had simply looked back at her and shrugged.

“Gonna go see a friend,” he’d said, easy as childhood.

There was no telling when he would meet the boy named Oikawa Tooru again, but the _where_ was easy enough to figure out. And so Iwaizumi finds himself once again in the clearing in the woods, surrounded by _wasurenagusa_ , with no tangible reason to explain his certitude in their next encounter other than the beating of his own heart. After all, he hadn’t a tangible reason the first time they’d met, either, and it still brought him to Oikawa; surely today will be no different.

So he waits. The forest is mostly shielded from the sun, but the canopy ends just where the green grass begins to give way to forget-me-not blue, and morning birds flitter by as Iwaizumi patiently waits for his friend’s return. His hands are itching by his side, eager to do something – Iwaizumi has never quite been good at keeping still – but here, by the tranquil pond, he refrains from indulging in his boundless energies. Instead, he quietly runs his fingers, stubby and soft with childhood, over the petals of the surrounding flowers, not quite feeling the passage of time.

A rustle of leaves catches his attention, and Oikawa Tooru emerges from the shadows of the forest. The sudden light of the clearing has him squinting, sunrays bouncing off his hair; he looks the same as he did before, but less frantic, a little more shy. Their eyes meet, then, but neither of them moves.

Then Oikawa asks, “Were you waiting for me?” and Iwaizumi stands and takes a few steps towards him.

He reaches out a hand. “Wanna go play?” he asks, earnest and solid. And just like the first time, Oikawa doesn’t hesitate – he nods and takes Iwaizumi’s hand.

Oikawa and Iwaizumi’s first experiences with life begin (and continue) just so: hand-in-hand, surrounded by _wasurenagusa_. Iwaizumi learns that Oikawa is deathly afraid of bugs (to his great delight), and Oikawa learns that Iwaizumi is terrible at lying (which costs them a grave amount of sweets, much to Oikawa’s chagrin). Iwaizumi lives just across the road from Oikawa, which means they’re stuck at the hip; Oikawa and Iwaizumi run and crawl and climb up every road, every hill, every crevice of their tiny chunk of the earth, tethered by the tangle of their fingers, pushed along by childhood wonder and held together through sheer force of will. Oikawa Tooru is boundless and star-bound; Iwaizumi Hajime is earth-sure with the sun on his back; Fate never quite catches its breath, the _wasurenagusa_ swaying in the breeze.

Almost a decade passes and they reach the tender age of 14, Oikawa growing taller than Iwaizumi, to the latter’s absolute dismay. Nothing has changed much, their bodies growing into themselves, their voices cracking with adolescence. Most things stay the same: they spend so much of their time together that it becomes routine – naturally, seamlessly slipping into each other’s day-to-day. Oikawa enters the Iwaizumi household without so much as a knock, kicking Iwaizumi’s feet away from the _irori_ to warm his own cold ones on winter days, earning a glare and a kick to the shins. They still go to the clearing after tirelessly working in the fields with their fathers, dipping their feet in the pond on particularly hot days and letting their laughter get carried by the wind.

“What are you making, Iwa-chan?” Oikawa asks one fine summer morning in the clearing in the woods, barging into Iwaizumi’s personal space. The boy only grunts in reply.

Iwaizumi has picked up a new hobby; his hands, always itching to do something, have learned to craft from wood and timber, a skill his father secretly teaches him in the day’s last rays of sun. Iwaizumi has always been good at this kind of thing, from patching up holes in his little sister’s _yukata_ to fixing leaking roofs, but for this he holds a quiet passion, and it’s something Oikawa can clearly see in the way his hands, almost gentle in their movements, cut the blade across the grooves of the wood with a clear and graceful precision. It’s mesmerizing, almost, to watch him work like this. Oikawa especially loves the way Iwaizumi’s eyes shift into something fierce and burning, focus narrowed down to the way the wood cuts in his palms. He finds himself a little breathless when Iwaizumi looks up and that gaze falls on him instead.

“It’s for _Okaa-san_ ,” Iwaizumi says, to answer Oikawa’s question. Oikawa nods solemnly, sitting back on his heels to let Iwaizumi work. Iwaizumi’s mother had fallen sick recently. They don’t talk about it, but he knows Iwaizumi thinks she won’t make it through.

Oikawa sits quietly by his side all day long, running his fingers over the petals of the _wasurenagusa_ , and when the sun starts to paint the trees in swathes of red and gold, the small blade in Iwaizumi’s hand glints as it is finally tucked away. Oikawa peers over Iwaizumi’s shoulder to watch as his fingers unfurl, and a small flower, a forget-me-not, blooms in his calloused palm. The wood Iwaizumi used is in no way fancy, doesn’t shine or glisten after a polish, but in the light of the retreating sun, it glitters, golden like the skin of Iwaizumi’s cheeks. Oikawa’s breath hitches in his throat. It’s beautiful.

“It’s beautiful,” he says to him. The boy grunts in reply, shy.

Iwaizumi’s first experience with death goes just like so: his mother passes, and Oikawa stays with him the whole time, rubbing tender circles down his back as saltwater drops from his eyes into the pond by their feet. When Iwaizumi’s eyelids become heavy with grief and the ache that comes after crying, Oikawa holds him in his arms, one hand stroking his hair. “Death,” Oikawa murmurs, more to himself than anyone else, a recollection of a memory long past, “is never the end.”

Iwaizumi falls asleep, sunlight painting him in swathes of red and gold, skin of his cheeks glittering with tears.

It’s on a day at the beginnings of the spring of their 15th year that it happens. Winter has passed, and the cold has started to dissipate from the air. Oikawa and Iwaizumi have swapped out their _hanten_ for thinner attire, trekking through the trees to their little haven in the woods like muscle memory. When they reach the clearing, Iwaizumi stops his steps right at the very edge of the canopy, and Oikawa continues until he’s standing at the centre of their little world. Iwaizumi vaguely remembers that this is where each of them had stood the first time they’d met, all those years ago. The recollection tugs lightly at his ribcage.

By Oikawa’s feet, forget-me-nots have just begun to bloom, spots of blue among the grass instead of the usual ocean. Oikawa has his face tilted up to the sky, eyes closed, sunlight cascading around him in sheets, falling short of Oikawa’s eyes but light against his lips and cheeks. He takes in a deep, deep breath, savouring the air. Then Oikawa turns and looks at Iwaizumi, and he smiles, tender and bright, and Fate feels the wind get knocked right out of its chest.

Slowly, Iwaizumi blinks at him, once, then again. The breeze picks up, swirling around them, and Iwaizumi stares at Oikawa and the way he smiles, stares at Oikawa and the way his hair gets messed up in the wind, stares at Oikawa and finds that he’s completely forgotten how to breathe.

Iwaizumi’s first experience with love starts just so: in that same clearing in the woods, with that same boy from all those years ago, budding like the forget-me-nots by Oikawa’s feet. Unknown to him, Oikawa’s begins in very much the same way, on another day, a little more down the road. They still fit naturally into each other’s lives, hands always reaching out for the other, but now the touches come with an unbearable anticipation, and a crescendo beat of the heart. Oikawa is in love with Iwaizumi, and Iwaizumi is in love with Oikawa, and Fate finds it harder and harder to breathe.

They have their feet dipped in the pond one hot summer day at the tail end of June of Oikawa’s 18th year, and he’s waiting to join Iwaizumi, who’s just begun his 19th. Oikawa remains taller than Iwaizumi, but Iwaizumi’s voice is much deeper, plucking at the strings of Oikawa’s heart whenever he murmurs his name. Iwaizumi’s more handsome now, too, growing more into his body as the years go by. Oikawa’s not doing so bad himself.

He wonders, at times, if it was always meant to be like this: Oikawa falling for a boy in a sea of forget-me-nots, the same boy who found him at the tender age of 6 when Oikawa had never even thought about the notion of love. It feels like it was, if he’s being honest. After all, _found_ is putting it simply – Oikawa has no idea _how_ Iwaizumi actually managed to be there right when he needed him, and he’s never asked, but he’s never really needed to; Oikawa thinks _meant to be_ is about as good an answer as any.

Oikawa looks up at Iwaizumi. He’s sitting with his hands propped behind him, calm and relaxed with his eyes closed, the lines of his face sharp and looking like they were shaped by the Gods. Here, they’re shaded from the sun, and Iwaizumi lets out a warm, contented sigh. Oikawa gets the irresistible urge to kiss him.

Then Iwaizumi opens his eyes and looks at him, and Oikawa’s heart gets caught in his chest.

A moment passes. There’s something in Iwaizumi’s gaze that Oikawa cannot name, and he holds his breath, waiting for something. Fate does the same. Another second goes by before Iwaizumi breaks eye contact, and his fingers, long and calloused with adolescence, reach for a forget-me-not by his side. Gently, he plucks it from the earth, and holds it between his fingers with a reverent sort of silence. Oikawa watches him quietly. Then Iwaizumi looks up at him, eyes as clear as the day they first met, and his fingers reach out for Oikawa.

Oikawa is frozen still. To him, the world seems to move in slow motion, Iwaizumi getting so close that Oikawa cannot breathe. He wonders vaguely if Iwaizumi is about to flick him on the forehead or something along those lines, but none such thing comes. Instead, Iwaizumi’s fingers brush against Oikawa’s temple, rough pads calloused, and he tucks the flower lightly, gently behind Oikawa’s ear. Oikawa shivers. Iwaizumi’s hand does not immediately return to his side; instead, it lingers against Oikawa’s skin, and Oikawa feels his heart thrashing against his ribcage.

Then Iwaizumi drops his hand. “I’m in love with you, Oikawa,” he says, earnest and solid, voice clear in the air between them. Oikawa feels his heart take flight. By their feet, the pond ripples with the wind, and the flower behind his ear trembles ever so slightly. Oikawa is breathless, breath-taking, half in a dream.

Their first experience with kissing begins with a tenderness that comes from uncertainty, and the clumsiness that comes with adolescence. But as quickly and naturally as they got to know each other, Oikawa learns the taste of Iwaizumi’s tongue, and the feel of Iwaizumi’s hands in his hair, down his back, against his thighs. Then more time goes by, and they’re on the cusp of 20 when they move to the bedroom, drunk with love and desperate for each other’s touch. They stumble through most of it the first time, clumsy and unsure; Fate loses its breath when Oikawa gasps _Hajime_ and Iwaizumi moans _Tooru_ , moonlight shining through the windowpanes. When they part, their fingers remain tangled, and in some ways nothing really changes. Oikawa is the eighth wonder of the world; Iwaizumi is larger than life; Fate is left winded and gasping for air.

“Hey, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa begins, huffing a breath into the crook of Iwaizumi’s neck. They’re lying facing each other, legs tangled in the bed sheets, one of Iwaizumi’s arms thrown lazily over Oikawa’s waist. Outside, the sky has turned into a dark shade of blue, night birds swooping low by their window. It’s a cold autumn night, the chill seeping through the walls, but Oikawa is warm in Iwaizumi’s embrace. His lover only hums in reply. “Do you wanna hear a story my _nee-san_ told me?”

Iwaizumi moves his arm, cards his fingers gently through the locks of Oikawa’s hair. “You’re gonna tell me even if I said no,” he replies, easy. Oikawa lets out an indignant squawk, pulling away slightly.

“I won’t now with that attitude,” he pouts, brows scrunched together. Iwaizumi laughs, a huff against Oikawa’s hair, and Oikawa feels his chest warm at the sound.

“Just tell me the damn story, Oikawa,” he says, lips melting into this crooked, boyish smile so achingly fond, and Oikawa glares at him for one more second before reluctantly letting his quip go. He settles back in Iwaizumi’s arms.

“They say,” Oikawa begins, running long fingers down Iwaizumi’s spine, “that when two people are destined to be lovers, the Gods bind them together with an invisible red cord.” Iwaizumi raises a brow, conjuring only vague recollections of such a story told by his mother, but does not interrupt. Oikawa continues, “No matter how far apart they are, no matter how long it takes, they’ll always find each other. In this life or the next.”

Outside, the moon is just beginning to slip from the sky. Oikawa’s fingers stop just at the small of Iwaizumi’s back, a ghost of a touch, and when he looks back at his lover, his eyes are shining in a way that takes Iwaizumi’s breath away. “Do you think we’re bound by fate, Iwa-chan?”

For a while, Iwaizumi says nothing. He brushes Oikawa’s hair behind his ear, quiet and pensive, before he pulls away from Oikawa completely and lies down flat on his back. Oikawa’s face scrunches up in confusion, but before he can say anything, Iwaizumi beats him to it.

“The day we met,” Iwaizumi says, eyes trained to the ceiling, “something brought me to you.” Oikawa’s eyes widen in surprise. He’s always wondered, but never felt the need to ask. “I never told you this, because it never made any sense to me. But that day, I felt this... _tugging_ on my heart.” Iwaizumi turns to look at Oikawa then, and Oikawa feels his breath get knocked right out of his chest. He feels a tingling in his fingertips. “That tugging,” Iwaizumi says, earnest and solid, “led me to you.”

Oikawa’s heart stills, catches in the spaces between his ribs. He stares at Iwaizumi, who stares back at him with the same look he had when he first told Oikawa he loved him, and Iwaizumi reaches out for Oikawa’s hand. Their fingers slot against each other, a perfect fit, and Iwaizumi brings their hands closer to his mouth. He presses his lips to Oikawa’s knuckles. In the light of the retreating moon, Iwaizumi thinks that Oikawa looks ephemeral.

“I don’t know anything about some red string,” Iwaizumi murmurs into the cracks of Oikawa’s skin, “or even about lifetimes or fate. But no matter where you are, I’ll find you. Gods or otherwise.”

Oikawa, behind the cover of shadows, blushes a light pink. Gently, he pulls his hand away from Iwaizumi’s own, and cups his lover’s face instead. “Is that a promise, Iwa-chan?” he asks, voice softened by the corners of his smile, barely above a whisper. Iwaizumi hums in consideration.

“Nothing so airy,” he replies, sure as ever, and Oikawa feels his heart take flight. “Call it a commitment.”

Iwaizumi pulls Oikawa closer to him, and Oikawa falls into him, breathless, breath-taking, half in a dream. 

Iwaizumi has never been the most romantic man on this side of the earth. He knows this, and he has no desire to change it. But there’s something about the way Oikawa looked at him that night that makes him want to _do_ something, his fingers itching by his side. Iwaizumi has always been more of a doer, anyway.

It's still rather early in the morning. He can hear birds chirping happily beyond the confines of Oikawa’s bedroom, sun filtering in through the windows and bathing Oikawa in the most gorgeous light. Iwaizumi loves every version of Oikawa there is, but this is probably one of his favourites: Oikawa lying in his arms, naked and drooling, hair a mess against his pillow. Iwaizumi thinks he looks ephemeral.

Then Oikawa stirs beside him, groaning softly in the wake of the morning. When his lashes flutter against his cheeks, Iwaizumi thinks of Oikawa’s story, and the idea of fate and Gods and other lifetimes. Oikawa’s mouth opens into a big, ugly yawn, and Iwaizumi can’t help it – he reaches out a hand and brushes a stray strand of hair from Oikawa’s face, and his touch seems to rouse Oikawa awake. His lover blinks up at him, beautiful and doe-eyed, and Iwaizumi thinks no other lifetime matters more than the one he’s in now, with Oikawa in his arms.

“G’morning,” Oikawa mumbles, smiling sleepily up at Iwaizumi, and Iwaizumi feels his heart swell against the walls of his chest. He returns the smile with one of his own, crooked and boyish, and presses his lips to his lover’s forehead.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Iwaizumi begins, as Oikawa stretches away the last remnants of sleep from his long limbs. The blanket covering them is pushed aside as Oikawa sits up, sunlight making his bare skin glow. Iwaizumi tears his gaze away from the expanse of Oikawa’s back, and locks eyes with his lover instead. “I got you something.”

“Oh?” Oikawa replies, a glint in his eyes. He smiles slyly. “You spoil me, Iwa-chan.”

Iwaizumi rolls his eyes, ignoring the tease. He pulls away from Oikawa and reaches under his pillow. From there he pulls out a small, simple black box, plain with no decoration. Iwaizumi smiles to himself before turning towards Oikawa again. He’s watching Iwaizumi with curiosity and interest, a small smile of anticipation on his lips, and Iwaizumi has never been the most romantic man on this side of the earth, but he thinks he might just be the luckiest.

Fate holds its breath. Iwaizumi moves closer to Oikawa, until he’s sitting right next to him. He clears his throat and opens the box.

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa breathes, eyes shining in astonishment and wonder, and Iwaizumi thinks back to the first time they’d met, 6 years old with their whole lives ahead of them, Oikawa’s eyes brimming with tears and a wonder for things he was yet to know. He thinks back to 15, and the first buds of love, and 19, to that very first kiss, and Iwaizumi thinks if the Gods haven’t already bound them together by some invisible string of fate, then he’ll damn well do it himself.

“I thought just saying it wouldn’t be enough,” Iwaizumi explains, as Oikawa reaches into the box, fingers trembling. Inside are two matching wooden bands, and Oikawa takes one into the palm of his hand. When he turns the ring with his fingers, he sees something carved into the inside of its curve. The word _一徹_ , spelled with the _kanji_ from Iwaizumi and Oikawa’s first names.

Oikawa looks up at Iwaizumi with wide eyes, realization setting in.

“ _Ittetsu_ ,” Iwaizumi says, taking the ring from his lover with one hand and Oikawa’s left hand with the other. Oikawa’s hands have always been cold no matter the weather, and they fit perfectly in Iwaizumi’s warm ones. “Obstinate. It means unbending, stubborn and headstrong. Like you,” he adds with a laugh that catches a little in his throat, thinking of Gods and fate, thinking of forget-me-nots in the wind, thinking of sheets of light falling short of Oikawa’s eyes but light against his lips and cheeks. Oikawa is looking at him with a wonder for things that he’s learned and discovered, and Iwaizumi feels 15 with the wind knocked out of him all over again.

He slips the wooden band onto Oikawa’s ring finger. A perfect fit.

“I wanted to solidify it,” Iwaizumi says, still holding on to Oikawa’s hand. When he looks at his lover, he sees that Oikawa’s eyes are shining, with tears and also something stronger, something like conviction. “My commitment to you. I wanted it to be something real enough that you can touch.”

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says again, breathless, breath-taking, half in a dream, and Iwaizumi’s about to make a quip about how he’s finally succeeded at rendering Oikawa speechless, but before he can say anything Oikawa has lunged forward, hands cradling Iwaizumi’s face, and Iwaizumi laughs against Oikawa’s lips as he wraps his arms around him.

Later that night, as they’re making love, Iwaizumi puts his lips to Oikawa’s chest, and presses the promise deep into his heart.

In the winter of their 26th year, the same year he fashions two rings out of wood engraved with his promise, Iwaizumi Hajime falls ill. The same sickness as his mother, the same pale skin. Oikawa is by his side despite Iwaizumi’s better judgement – Iwaizumi’s hand, so usually warm and full of life, lies cold and limp in Oikawa’s own. He’s sleeping, now. Oikawa likes to pretend that there’s no chance Iwaizumi will never wake up, but even he can’t seem to fool himself.

Hours pass. Oikawa takes it in stride, takes every rise and fall of Iwaizumi’s chest as a blessing. He feels 6 years old again, with that thick sloshing feeling in his stomach, the desire to take off and never stop. The clearing stays where it is, that ocean of blue covered now by snow. Oikawa could go there if he wanted to, but he doesn’t want to; it’s not the same, after all, without the boy standing at the very edge of the light, voice clear in the air between them. _Wasurenagusa._

_How could I ever?_ he thinks, smile a little crooked, too soft around the eyes.

When Iwaizumi’s eyelids flutter open, neither of them knows it’s for the last time. Oikawa smiles, relief flooding his lungs, but it’s not enough to stave off the gnawing worry in his chest. Iwaizumi knows this. Despite how weak he feels, Iwaizumi smiles anyway, crooked and boyish.

“Tooru,” he calls out, blinking slowly, squeezing Oikawa’s cold fingers. It feels like a butterfly’s touch to Oikawa, a flutter of blue petals, but he presses into it, presses it into his heart.

_No matter where you are, I’ll find you_ , Oikawa doesn’t say, but he knows Iwaizumi hears it anyway. _I’ll find you, I’ll find you, I’ll find you._

Oikawa and Iwaizumi’s first experiences with life end just so: in his final moments, Iwaizumi refuses to release Oikawa’s hand, his smile the most beautifully damned thing Oikawa has ever seen. Oikawa lives on until old age, never taking another partner, and does not return to the clearing until his time comes. When it does, it’s a fine spring morning, and Oikawa lies in a sea of forget-me-nots, sunlight basking everything around him in a golden glow. The wooden band on his finger glitters in the light. Fate lets go of the breath it had been holding, and Oikawa breathes his final one.

**II.**

In their next life, the Gods make them akin to stars. Lightyears apart. Burning, burning, burning in the dark.

**III.**

Iwaizumi dreams. This time, he’s in a dark room, illuminated only by the dying flames of a hearth, the heat of the _irori_ licking warmth against his skin. In his hands, a blade and a band of wood. This is a new dream, he thinks. He’s never seen this one before.

His hands are meticulous, careful; they scratch the blade against the inner curve of the ring with the precision Iwaizumi has honed all his life. It’s nothing like the instruments Iwaizumi has worked with, though – the band smaller, weaker, demanding a delicacy in its treatment that these dream-fingers, his and not his all at once, have clearly mastered in their lifetime. When he’s done, he inspects his work, and Iwaizumi sees the engraving then, illuminated by swathes of red and golden light: _一徹_.

_Ittetsu_ , he hears himself say, except it’s not him saying it. The surface of a pond being disturbed, and then suddenly he’s in another room, bathing in light. _Call it a commitment_ , he says, kissing it into familiar skin. The ring slips onto a finger, a perfect fit.

Then Iwaizumi wakes up. A rush of air in his lungs, his eyes flying open to the view of a dark room; reality seeps in from the edges of his vision slowly as Iwaizumi comes to. Then he groans, feeling himself sticky with sweat as he sits up slowly. One hand comes up to rub at his temples, nausea rolling in his stomach. Another dream. A different one this time, one he doesn’t recognize – it’s been a while since he’s had one of those – but the hand in the dream is the same hand in all the other dreams. Fingers long and calloused with adolescence, cold no matter the weather. Familiar against his own skin.

Iwaizumi draws in a slow, slow breath, then exhales just as slowly. Another breath, like he’s trying to expel everything inside him with air (it doesn’t work), and he stretches out his fingers, just to get them to stop tingling (it doesn’t work). He’s had these dreams since he was 6 years old – him in a clearing, him in the woods, hand always tethered to some other hand, and he knows they aren’t just normal dreams. _Memories_ , he stops himself from thinking. _They feel like memories._

Outside, the moon is just beginning to slip from the sky. He can hear the sound of crickets chirping, the hoot of a night bird swooping low by his window. His room is filled with shadow, not enough moonlight to reach him where he lays, and Iwaizumi sees the word glinting in his mind’s eye. _Ittetsu_. Something heavy curls quietly at the pit of his stomach, as if disturbed from its slumber by the dream, the tail end of it flicking at his heart. In the earlier days, Iwaizumi had tried to make sense of the feeling, but now, at 26, he knows better – this longing, like the flitting hand in all those dreams, is not something he can hold, no matter how far he tries to reach. Iwaizumi sighs. He doesn’t think he’ll be getting any sleep tonight (he never does, when the dreams come).

That morning, just as the sun rays begin to creep through the windows of his home, Iwaizumi is already out the door.

Expectedly, he’s the first one in the koto shop today. Iwaizumi pockets the key, closing the front door behind him before he makes his way to the back of the building. The shop is quiet, bathed in hues of morning blue, dark wood of the displayed instruments glistening. Iwaizumi absentmindedly runs his hand over the wooden surface of the counter as he passes it by, humming a lullaby he doesn’t remember the words to.

The shop is divided into two main parts, the reception at the front where they display their finest Japanese koto, a string instrument made of strong wood, and a larger space at the back, where Iwaizumi, his master, and two other apprentices do their work. Out the back door, rows of _kora_ , the shell of the koto, have been left on tall shelves to dry in the sun, carved out of the trunks of paulownia trees. Soon, Iwaizumi will take a batch of these and start refining them, perfecting them down to the smallest detail, moulding them into a shape capable of carrying the precise tones of koto music. For now, Iwaizumi lets them dry.

He starts opening the windows to let the light in, the sun blinking awake in the sky. There’s a smell of wood that’s ever present in the shop, that sticks to Iwaizumi’s clothes, and Iwaizumi breathes it in almost appreciatively. Iwaizumi loves this shop. It’s one of the few places where he can find any peace.

He’s making his way to the reception to start dusting off the displays when something glints in the corner of his vision. Iwaizumi stops in his tracks. By the wall on the right side of the room are rows of _kora_ that have been dried and further carved to refinement, waiting only to be burned and finished. There’s one in particular that draws Iwaizumi’s attention; he takes a few tentative steps towards it before running his hands over the smooth wood. It’s a fine piece, perfect if not for the _ayasugi_ , the herringbone pattern carved into the inside of its curve, that’s only slightly askew. It seems a simple mistake, one that can surely be rectified, but the tone of the koto depends heavily on the precision of the _ayasugi_ , and Iwaizumi’s master accepts nothing but absolute perfection. Washijou-sama has always been particular about these kinds of things, has always had this one, simple way of carving: the perfect angle, the perfect length. Anything deviating is intolerable. He remembers him, fuming as he’d inspected the flawed shell: _this has no use for us now._ Iwaizumi wonders if that’s true.

He hears shuffling from the front of the store, and stands quickly to see who it is; Kunimi and Kindaichi, the other two apprentices have just arrived at the shop. They greet Iwaizumi with polite bows, Kunimi bored and Kindaichi excited, and Iwaizumi nods back at them, smiling. He puts the abandoned koto in the back of his mind.

With the three of them here now, setting up shop becomes a simple task, and the floors have been swept and instruments dusted by the time their master arrives. It’s Iwaizumi’s turn to tend the reception, while the other two get to work carving their instruments under their master’s scrutiny. It’s a while before anyone even comes in.

Kuroo-san, with his ghastly hair and awful grin, is the only one to enter the store today. He’s here as a representative of _Ikuta ryu_ , one of the finest koto schools, to check on the progress of the instruments they had ordered. Washijou-sama often boasts how _Ikuta ryu_ only buys their instruments from this very shop, an indicator of the quality of their koto. It never mattered much to Iwaizumi, but it meant good pay and an opportunity to learn from the best, which was why he decided to learn the trade here. Other than Kuroo-san’s brief visit, it’s a quiet day.

Reception isn’t his favourite job; with no distraction, Iwaizumi’s mind is left to wander towards things like dreams and familiar skin, and that’s the exact opposite of what he needs right now. He takes in a deep breath, forces himself to think of other things: the smell of wood in the air, the incomplete koto left to waste. Iwaizumi’s fingers itch by his side. He wonders if he can do something with it. He decides to ask his master when the day ends.

“Do with it what you want,” Washijou-sama answers as they’re cleaning up, gruff. “It’s your time you’ll be wasting. The sound won’t be perfect, so there’s no point.”

“That’s fine,” Iwaizumi immediately replies, bowing deeply. “Thank you, _sensei_.”

Kindaichi gives him a curious look, but otherwise says nothing. They finish closing up, the koto in question glinting in the evening sun.

Iwaizumi waits until his day off to do anything with it. Neither Kindaichi nor Kunimi say anything when they find him in the shop first thing in the morning, running his hand down the smooth _kora_ , his fingers tracing the lines of the _ayasugi_ with a quiet reverence. It really is a beautiful piece. He knows the other two in the room must think it’s a shame, for such beautiful wood to be wasted, but Iwaizumi knows better. Perfection does not make a koto beautiful, no matter what his master says.

A gentle wind comes in from the open window, tickling the hair by his ear as if in agreement. Iwaizumi huffs out a small puff of air and gets to work.

He starts refining the _kora_ just a little bit further, carving away at the wood until it arches perfectly under his hand. He can hear the songs of birds chirping outside, children laughing in the sun. From inside the shop, however, no sound emits from either of the three apprentices, except for the occasional scrape of wood against metal. Iwaizumi lets out a slow, slow breath. He can feel it happening – sometimes, when he’s _really_ focused, his concentration starts to narrow down to only the wood in his hands, the blade against it; he can feel himself completely empty, like a fog lifted from his mind. Everything else falls away, then, except for this: the koto taking form in his hands, the feel of wood against his skin. His master says it’s a primal thing, that this is when the craftsman truly connects with their instrument, as if tethered together by the koto’s silken strings. Iwaizumi thinks of it as a solace from his dreams.

Once he’s satisfied with its shape and thickness, Iwaizumi attaches the bottom part of the body, a long plank of wood, to its curved upper half by tying them together using several cords of rope and rectangular blocks of wood. As he lets the koto set, Iwaizumi moves to the hearth, and gets a charcoal fire going. He grabs the tool he needs, a block of steel attached to a long handle, and heats it in the fire. He needs to sear the wood next.

When the steel starts to glow red and orange and the koto has set, Iwaizumi removes the rope, and brings the koto to the work station by the hearth. He takes the steel block out of the hearth and begins guiding it down the smooth surface of the _kora_ in one long strip. Flames flicker to life as steel meets wood, dying down as he navigates his tool. This is his favourite part of the process. It’s meant to ensure the durability of the instrument, to strengthen it by fire. He brushes the ashes way and moves the block to the head of the koto again, smoothing it down to the other end, watching as the wood turns black against the lick of flames. Iwaizumi sears every surface of the _kora_ , transfixed, relishing in the heat of the fire against his skin. His cheeks are painted in swathes of red and gold.

When he’s done, he scrubs the surface of the koto until the black gives way to dark wood. All that’s left now is to carve out parts of the body to make fissures where the small parts are attached, and put on the strings. He already has a set of the decorative parts finished. He gets to work immediately, almost as if entranced, and Kindaichi and Kunimi don’t dare bother him when he gets like this. Iwaizumi is empty, connected by the silken strings of the koto to the instrument taking shape in his hands, and no koto-maker half their worth would disturb such reverence. They only leave him extra slices of fruit from lunch, for when he’s done.

Iwaizumi works tirelessly until the day’s last rays of sun start creeping over the horizon. Both Kindaichi and Kunimi have already left, and the fire by the hearth has been reduced to dying embers. He’s attaching the last of the strings, pulling them taut across the wood, when a gentle breeze tickles just behind his ear, like a lover sighing against his skin. Iwaizumi’s hands stutter in their motions, suspended in the air.

_Ittetsu_. He doesn’t so much hear it rather than _feels_ it, like a tugging on the heart, the silk strings lying limp in his hand. There’s that creature curling in his stomach again, and Iwaizumi thinks back to the dream, the wooden band with a perfect fit. _Ittetsu_. Iwaizumi lets out a slow, slow breath, like he’s expelling all the air out of him, and he makes a decision. His fingers get to work.

The strings have been attached, and the bridges have been added. The final step is branding. His master absolutely refuses to sell or even touch koto that were not carved to perfection, so this one is all Iwaizumi’s. He turns his back on the instrument. He knows there’s a small carving blade among their tools somewhere.

When he finds it, Iwaizumi returns to the almost-finished koto, the instrument quietly asking for a name to belong to. Iwaizumi feels his heart thrashing against his ribcage, no longer empty. For this, he thinks it’s better this way.

His hand moves the blade against the grooves of the wood with a precision Iwaizumi has honed all his life. It’s almost delicate, the way his fingers work, almost gentle in their motions; when he’s done, Iwaizumi exhales, and for the first time since the dream he feels his heart settle back inside his chest. Illuminated by the red and golden light of the dying sun, carved at the head of the koto, is the word: _一徹_. Fate feels its breath catch in its chest.

That night, Iwaizumi dreams again. This time, it’s a dream that’s all too familiar: he’s in a bed that’s not his own, in a room he cannot recognize with memory – but the bedsheets feel like home all the same. Curled up against his side is _him_ , whoever he is, the ghost that’s been haunting his dreams. From this angle, Iwaizumi can’t see his face, but he catches glimpses of long eyelashes, and the slope of a porcelain nose. The first time he’d had this dream, Iwaizumi had tried desperately to reach out, to see the face of this stranger that has always kept him up at night – now, though, he knows he will never discover more than this. Iwaizumi’s hand, long and calloused with adolescence, aching with something he cannot name, cards gently through the locks of the man’s hair. The man sighs against his pillow.

He will never discover more than this. Iwaizumi knows this now, but he can’t help wanting more all the same.

And then he wakes. His room is dark save for the sliver of moonlight that doesn’t reach him where he lays, and Iwaizumi feels a shiver reach for his spine, but doesn’t quite get a hold of it. The left side of his body feels cold. When he blinks, eyes adjusting to the night, he finds his vision is blurry. Iwaizumi brings up a hand to wipe at his eyes, sitting up as he does so, and – well, this part isn’t unfamiliar either.

It’s not something that happens often, but when it does, Iwaizumi never knows what to do with his hands. He wants to claw at his chest with the way his lungs constrict and expand, pushing against his ribcage like there isn’t enough room for all this god forsaken heartache because there _isn’t_ , and Iwaizumi’s been through this enough times to know that the scabs his nails leave the day after are nothing compared to _this_ ; this, his breathing shallow where his breath can’t get past his throat, the lack of it leaving him lightheaded; this, the heels of his hands pressing against his eyes, hard enough for stars to form, not to stop the tears but to stop the memories, dreams, whatever it is that grates so heavy against his heart. Iwaizumi feels that creature at the pit of his stomach, trying to claw its way out of his ribcage, and the tail end of it curls around his heart and _tugs_ , so damn hard Iwaizumi chokes on air, his entire body shaking.

He never makes a sound when he cries. Not because he doesn’t want to, but because he can’t bear to.

Eventually, the feeling passes, and so does the crying. The creature inside him settles down again, his constant companion, longing nestling in the pit of his stomach. Iwaizumi is left feeling tired and empty, not more so than before, not more so than he has his entire lifetime, and lays his head on his pillow, eyes heavy with grief and the ache that comes after crying. The tune of a lullaby he doesn’t remember the words to plays in his mind. Iwaizumi falls asleep, moonlight never reaching him where he lays.

When he shows his master the finished koto, Washijou-sama says nothing for a long, long time. Iwaizumi doesn’t know if it’s anger, or reverence, or something else entirely, but his master seems blurry at the edges, his fingers so light against the silken strings that they barely move at all. The silence feels almost still in the air.

“The sound isn’t perfect, so I won’t sell it,” Washijou-sama says after some time, which is exactly what Iwaizumi had predicted – but his tone is different, tender almost, aching with something Iwaizumi cannot name. The koto glints in the evening light. Washijou-sama blinks slowly, and pulls his hand away from the strings. The sound it makes is soft and imperfect and beautiful. “But you can put it in the displays, on the top shelf in the corner.”

Iwaizumi’s eyes widen, breath catching in his throat. It’s a rare admission, an acknowledgement on a koto that’s been deemed so imperfect, and Iwaizumi feels his chest clear, a rush of air in his lungs; he bows deeply and thanks Washijou-sama, who only grunts in reply.

His master stares at the koto for one more moment before turning away.

**IV.**

It’s been a while since Oikawa has stepped outside the confines of his home. Most days he spends refining his art, kneeling on the _tatami_ mats until they leave imprints on his shins. His mother had insisted he follow her today, said he could use the fresh air and sunlight after practising tirelessly day and night, and Oikawa had agreed to come solely to please her. The walk to the shop isn’t all that far, and while Oikawa isn’t enjoying it, he doesn’t necessarily abhor it either. Merchants and noblemen fill the streets, all seemingly content in the afternoon sun, as Oikawa and his mother make their way to the koto shop where _Ikuta ryu_ , the koto school his great-grandfather had started a century and a half ago, acquire all their instruments. His mother is chatting away, greeting the friends she recognizes as they pass by, and Oikawa smiles and nods accordingly. Truthfully, he just wants to return home and continue his lessons.

The storefront is entirely inconspicuous. Oikawa doesn’t think much of it, but when he follows his mother through the door, he feels something in the air shift. Fate holds its breath when Oikawa’s steps falter, just for half a second, and Oikawa lets out a small puff of air. A gust of wind tickles the hair behind his ear. He can hear his heart beating in his chest, a crescendo, but his mother continues on without so much as a glance towards him.

It’s a quaint little space, the walls lined with shelves of beautifully-crafted koto, the floors and counter immaculate and pristine. His mother greets the older man at the reception amicably ( _Kindaichi-sama_ , Oikawa hears) while Oikawa lets out another breath, longer this time, trying to collect himself. He tries to stuff down the feeling rising in his throat, the feeling that something – _something is calling for him_ – and swallows the thought down. Shakes his head to clear it away, forces himself to think of other things.

Oikawa’s eyes begin to wander, studying the displayed instruments quietly. Swathes of golden sunlight filter through the windows of the shop, coating the dark wood of the koto in a soft glow. He makes his way around the store as his mother deals with Kindaichi-sama. There’s nothing really interesting, just rows and rows of the Japanese instrument, and while they are all beautiful, they all look terribly similar.

Oikawa lets out a small sigh, a mixture of relief and disappointment as he waves away whatever had caught in his throat when he first entered the store. He begins to turn away to return to his mother’s side when something glints at the corner of his vision. The man stops in his tracks. There, on the highest shelf at the corner of the shop, is a koto more beautiful than anything he’s ever seen. Oikawa takes a sharp intake a breath, and before he knows it, he’s already taken three quick strides towards it, hands reached out to rest lightly against the glittering wood. His fingers, long and calloused with adolescence, hover over the silken strings, so delicate they barely move. Oikawa is breathless, breath-taking, half in a dream.

“How much is this one?” he asks, transfixed, cutting into his mother and Kindaichi-sama’s conversation. His mother looks offended at the interruption, but Kindaichi-sama doesn’t seem as bothered by his rudeness so much as he is by the koto in Oikawa’s hands.

“I– I apologize, but that’s not for sale,” he says, sounding unsure of himself. Oikawa turns to him, confused.

“This is your finest instrument,” Oikawa counters, sceptical, “and you won’t sell it? Why?”

He can see his mother chastising him with one of her _looks_ , but Oikawa ignores her. Kindaichi-sama looks to her as if for guidance, and then to Oikawa, and then finally to the koto in question. A moment passes as he considers the instrument; something seems to settle inside him, then, blurring him around the edges, and Kindaichi-sama lets out a small puff of air. He looks like he’s watching a memory unfold in his mind’s eye.

“The _ayasugi_ ,” he explains, stepping out from behind the counter to walk to where Oikawa stands. “It wasn’t carved properly. The tone of the koto isn’t right.” As if to demonstrate, Kindaichi-sama reaches out and plucks the silken strings, and it’s true: the sound is off, not the tone that _Ikuta ryu_ uses in its music. His mother, always dramatic in her motions, almost faints at the very sound of it. “The mistake was mine,” Kindaichi-sama says, looking away as if in apology, “and my master, Washijou-sama, decided it was best thrown away.”

“Why wasn’t it?” Oikawa asks, intrigued. Kindaichi-sama turns to him, eyes soft and fond with memory.

“Another apprentice had asked to complete it anyway,” he answers, corners of his eyes crinkling in a smile. “It was such a beautiful piece my master allowed it to be displayed.”

Then Kindaichi-sama frowns again. “He strictly forbade us from selling it, however. It would ruin our reputation.”

Oikawa finds himself shaking his head in disagreement. “Perfection isn’t what makes a koto beautiful,” he says, and there’s a flash of something in Kindaichi-sama’s eyes, something like recognition. It’s gone in an instant, though. “Please. We will pay you a fair price. If you’re worried about your reputation, then I promise you I will not play it for anyone but myself. So please,” he pleads, jaw set in determination, “sell me this koto.”

Kindaichi-sama considers him for a moment, uncertainty and fear in his eyes, but Oikawa sees something else, too, something Oikawa cannot name. A moment passes, the length of a heartbeat. A gentle wind tickles the hair behind Oikawa’s ear, and Kindaichi-sama nods minutely, conceding. “Okay,” he agrees, and Oikawa breaks into a smile, elation rising in his stomach.

His mother eyes him curiously, more than a little baffled by the events that had unfolded, but otherwise says nothing. Kindaichi-sama promises to deliver the koto first thing tomorrow morning, which is later than Oikawa likes, but he figures he’s pushed the old man enough for one day. He isn’t sure he’ll be welcome should he choose to visit again someday.

As they’re wrapping up, Oikawa thinks back to Kindaichi-sama’s words, the apprentice that had shaped the instrument to its current form. He asks, then, for the koto-maker’s name. Kindaichi-sama smiles, eyes crinkling at the corners in fondness, before he answers, “Iwaizumi Hajime.” Fate feels the wind get knocked right out of its chest.

Oikawa has never heard the name before. It is entirely unfamiliar to him, and yet it rattles against his ribcage, catches in his throat. Oikawa blinks at the old store owner slowly, feels a tingling at his fingertips. _Iwaizumi Hajime_. Oikawa doesn’t know what compels him, but he presses the name deep into his heart, carves it into his memory.

“Where is he now?” Oikawa asks, not sure what he even wants to do with the information. Kindaichi-sama’s eyes soften, turning sad.

“He passed a few months ago,” Kindaichi-sama says, and a gust of wind blows right through Oikawa. “I’m sure you would have liked him.”

When the koto arrives in the morning, Oikawa wastes no time. He lays it out on the _tatami_ mat, runs his hands all over the wood and silken strings. It’s beautiful. The wood grain almost glitters in the morning light, the patterned swirls undeniably breath-taking. Oikawa can _feel_ the care and attention that had been put into creating the instrument, fingers lightly caressing the koto from _ryūbi_ to _ryūzu_ ; but his movements stutter when his fingers catch against an engraving in the wood. Oikawa bends over to inspect it; there, at the head of koto, is the word _一徹_ _._

A gust of wind blows right through him, catching lightly against the silken strings. Oikawa sits back on his heels, slowly, and the name echoes in his mind again: _Hajime_. He lets out a slow, slow breath. _Ittetsu. Hajime._ Oikawa does not know why these words grate so heavy against his heart, but he feels them catch against his throat, feels them float in the air like the last note of a love song he can’t remember the words to.

Oikawa takes in a deep, deep breath, as if to expel everything inside him with air, and settles himself on the right side of the instrument, the _tatami_ mat well and familiar against his knees. He slips on his _tsume_ , ivory picks used to play the instrument, onto the first three fingers of his right hand, starting from the thumb. His left hand moves to adjust the bridges so each string is tuned correctly. Then he strikes the first chord.

His home has always been quiet, made so to let Oikawa concentrate on his playing, and the sound resonates in the air, music coming to life by his fingertips. Oikawa plucks at the silken strings, entranced, feeling his heart melt into each note, each chord. He closes his eyes. It’s a sweet old song, a lullaby his mother used to hum, one he could never catch the words to. The notes flow smoothly into each other, pure and dulcet, carding gently through Oikawa’s hair like the aching hand of a lover. All this time, Oikawa could never find the right tone to play it with. Not until this flawed koto with its imperfection, matching flawlessly with its tune.

The song ends. The final note floats in the air, and Oikawa lets out a slow, slow breath. When he opens his eyes again, he finds his vision is blurry. Oikawa brings up a hand to wipe at his eyes, and – oh. He’s never cried when playing before.

His eyes wander to the carving by the _ryūzu. Ittetsu._ He doesn’t know what compels him, but he presses the word deep into his heart, carves it into his memory. _Hajime._ Oikawa cannot stop his tears from flowing.

**V.**

It’s the tail end of Iwaizumi’s shift. He can feel the exhaustion weighing heavy on his shoulders, a crick in his neck starting to form, the tug of a tired sigh. The fluorescent lights flicker overhead. It’s been a long day. He can’t remember the last time it wasn’t.

Becoming a doctor had been more of a family ambition rather than his own, but Iwaizumi isn’t complaining, not really. The work is tireless and tiring, and some days drag their claws across his chest in agony, days like today, but Iwaizumi has always landed on his feet, and he’s good at his job to boot. He’s never been one to sit still anyway, fingers always itching to do something, so living in constant motion is, in some ways, refreshing. He doesn’t get much sunlight, though. And more often than not he finds himself really wanting a power nap.

It’s the tail end of Iwaizumi’s shift, and he’s wrapping up his tasks with little trouble. He’s thinking of grabbing a cup of coffee (his fifth one of the day) and finishing the last of his reports as he’s walking past the patient wards, and then he feels a sudden, sharp _tugging_ on his heart.

_Okay_ , he thinks, a million and one things racing in his mind, _what the fuck?_ Iwaizumi staggers back, feeling like the air has been ripped from his lungs. He wonders, vaguely, if he’s about to have a heart attack, one hand coming up to rest on his chest, but he shakes the thought away; somehow he knows this is something different altogether. Iwaizumi takes in a few deep breaths, tries to slow down the beating of his heart.

What gets him, really, is not so much the tugging, but rather the _familiarity_ that comes with it. Iwaizumi tries to remember a time when he’d ever felt – _this_ , this aching in his chest, but nothing comes to mind. He turns around, looks back at the open door of the patient ward. Nothing happens for a moment, Iwaizumi waiting for something – and then something comes and it _tugs_ again, stronger this time, with something like conviction, and Iwaizumi has to take another deep breath. Confusion and apprehension settle deep in the furrow of his brow, unsure what exactly is happening to him, but nevertheless, Iwaizumi follows the tugging of his heart and takes a few tentative steps towards the ward.

Inside, two rows of beds line the walls, eight on each side. Some of them are empty, and the ones that are occupied are all patients who are sound asleep; somehow, Iwaizumi knows that what he’s looking for is at the other end of the room, opposite where he stands. He lets out a slow, slow breath, and lets his feet carry him forward.

Only one of the beds is occupied on this end. Iwaizumi stops just by its side; on it lies a man who looks about Iwaizumi’s age, sleeping soundly. The lamp by his bedside has been left on, and its glow is almost harsh against the man’s pale skin. Long lashes brush his cheeks, a porcelain nose, lips slightly chapped, and more than beautiful, Iwaizumi thinks he looks _tired_ , like all the sleep in the world couldn’t drain the exhaustion out of him. On his bedside table is a vase of blue flowers that Iwaizumi doesn’t recognize. The chair by his bedside is empty.

Iwaizumi takes in a slow, slow breath. He doesn’t recognize the man, has never seen him before; and yet the very sight of him stirs something inside Iwaizumi, something he cannot name, climbing up his ribcage and wrapping its ugly tail around his heart. There’s that tugging again, and that familiarity, and Iwaizumi feels his chest ache with a feeling he’s never felt before. Iwaizumi cannot remember how to breathe.

He’d lost a patient once, when he was first starting out. When Iwaizumi had informed the mother of her loss, she hadn’t cried – instead, she took a breath and sat down. Started telling him about how the sky looked on her way to the hospital, the camellias she had seen in the flowerbeds by the entrance. His teacher, an older man who was as strict as he was kind, told him that that’s how people cope, sometimes, when faced with the overwhelming: like their brain short-circuits and they forget to react to the thing itself. Instead, they take a chair next to the bed of a stranger that pulls wildly at their heartstrings, and sit down and note how the fluorescent light flickers against the stranger’s skin. They take in a deep breath. They exhale.

Iwaizumi sits down. He takes note of the flickering light above the patient’s head. He takes in a deep breath and exhales. Then he looks at the man on the bed, fast asleep and maybe dreaming, if Iwaizumi knew how to hope for such things, and Iwaizumi feels the creature in his chest squeeze against his heart. Somehow, he can just imagine the man’s eyes fluttering open, brown eyes full of a wonder for things he is yet to know, and upon the sight of Iwaizumi’s stricken face, he would smile something beautiful, and the ache in Iwaizumi’s chest would be waved away like clouds on a sunny day. But the man doesn’t wake up, nor does he mysteriously call out Iwaizumi’s name with a fondness meant for lovers; Iwaizumi isn’t even sure where the idea of these reveries come from. He’s never been much of a dreamer, after all.

And yet his heart yearns for it anyway. His hand, aching and terribly empty, reaches for the man’s hand, and when he quietly slips into the spaces between the man’s fingers, Iwaizumi feels his heart take flight. There’s a faint scar just above his elbow, one straight line, and dirt under his nails like he had just been gardening before he found himself in a hospital bed. Moonlight shines through the window by the bed, not quite reaching the stranger where he lays, and in the glow of the fluorescent light, Iwaizumi thinks that the man looks ephemeral. He presses their palms closer together. The stranger’s hand is cold and fits perfectly against Iwaizumi’s own. If Iwaizumi knew how to hope for such things, he thinks the man smiles in his sleep.

In the end, the man dies.

_Tooru_. Iwaizumi learns his name when he finds the patient bed empty the next day, blue flowers wilting by his bedside, and asks around the hospital staff for any information. Tooru had been fresh out of surgery when Iwaizumi found him; he had gone just a few hours after Iwaizumi pulled away. Apparently, his death didn’t come as a surprise for any of his doctors.

_Tooru_. There’s that creature in his chest again, tugging on his heart, ripping the breath away from his lungs. Why does the name of a patient he doesn’t even know wring his heart so? He wasn’t even there when they’d called time of death, the chair by his bedside empty. He didn’t even know him.

Iwaizumi presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, tries to forget the feel of the man’s hand against his own. His not-there smile, the dirt under his nails. The big brown eyes he never got to see. Distantly, Iwaizumi wonders if Tooru had been dreaming after all.

He’d asked a nurse, one day, what the flowers were called. _Forget-me-not_ , she’d said.

_How could I ever?_ Iwaizumi thinks, though he doesn’t know where the thought comes from. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t write eulogies or sermons or any of that shit. But Iwaizumi takes the name of _Tooru_ , and presses it into his heart, saving it for – well, he doesn’t really know what. No matter how much times passes the name stays in its place, inside an emptiness he can neither fill, nor explain. The tugging on his heart does not cease.

**VI.**

When Oikawa bumps into him, it’s almost like the world starts to move in slow motion. Oikawa’s shoulder is pushed back slightly by the impact, and the keychain in his hand slips from his grasp. It almost glints in the morning light, dull blue backlit by the sun, before clattering to the concrete pavement between them. There’s a moment of pause before Oikawa moves to pick it up, but the stranger beats him to it.

The stranger in question is a man who looks around Oikawa’s age, maybe a little bit older. His hair is black and spiky, tan skin glittering gold in the morning sun. He’s wearing a light blue shirt the colour of Oikawa’s keychain, the sleeves of it rolled up to his elbows. There’s a swathe of what looks like red paint on the thigh of his jeans. Oikawa thinks it suits him.

“Sorry,” the stranger says, straightening up and holding out his hand. “I think you dropped this.” His voice is deep and smooth, plucking at Oikawa’s heartstrings, fingers long and calloused. Oikawa’s eyes trace the strong lines of his hand, the muscles of his arm, before snapping up to catch the man’s gaze. He loses his breath a little when he does.

The man’s eyes are sharp and a shade of green that reminds Oikawa of the haworthias by his windowsill, where he likes to sit and read whenever he has the time. There’s a small apologetic smile on his face, crooked in a boyish way, and a gust of wind blows between them. Oikawa is breathless, breath-taking, half in a dream. The keychain glints in the sun.

Oikawa blinks, once, twice, before slowly reaching out and taking the keychain from the stranger’s hand. Their fingers brush, a feather-light touch, and Fate loses its breath at the same time Oikawa’s heart stutters in his chest. He would’ve thought he was going crazy, reacting in such a way to the simple gaze of a man he’s never met, except Oikawa catches the stranger’s eyes right then and sees a flash of something in them, something like – like familiarity, if not recognition. Oikawa lets out a shaky breath.

“Do I know you?” he finds himself asking, not sure when the thought had formed. The stranger stares back at him for a moment, the length of a heartbeat, before his lips curl into a crooked, boyish smile.

“Funny, I was going to ask you the same thing,” he replies, brows slightly furrowed in confusion. Oikawa feels his heart catch in the spaces between his ribs.

“I’m Oikawa Tooru,” he says, and he sees that flash again, though Oikawa isn’t sure even the stranger knows what it means. Oikawa’s hand curls into a loose fist around his keychain. It’s made of wood, carved into a forget-me-not, Oikawa’s favourite flower. He’d accidentally left it at the library down the street yesterday, and left his home this morning to retrieve it. It’s a lucky charm of sorts. The dull edges of the wood dig into his palm.

The stranger lets out a puff of air, sounding as shaky as Oikawa feels. “I’m Iwaizumi Hajime,” he says, and Oikawa feels his heart take flight. He blinks once, then again, feels the name burn inside his chest. Oikawa has never given much thought to fate and soulmates, but the tugging on his heart might just make him a believer.

He has to know who Iwaizumi is. He has to.

“Do you want to–”

“Sorry, I have to–” they both start saying at the same time, but Oikawa cuts himself off.

“–go,” Iwaizumi finishes, looking apologetic again. Oikawa falters for only half a second before he nods, hoping the smile he gives is at least somewhat convincing. His heart is full of things he cannot name, thrashing against his ribcage, every inch of him against the thought of pulling away. Oikawa ignores all of it.

“Of course,” Oikawa says, sounding lighter than he feels, “sorry for taking up your time.”

Iwaizumi nods, beginning to turn away, but then he falters, too. He looks back at Oikawa, the length of a heartbeat, before raising his left hand in farewell. The silver ring on his finger glints in the morning sun. “I’ll see you around,” he says, ending like a question, like a hope Oikawa doesn’t dare possess, and Oikawa wants to believe it could be true.

He raises his own hand in farewell, and watches Iwaizumi’s back retreat down the street, feeling something burning, burning, burning somewhere deep. Oikawa never does end up seeing Iwaizumi again.

**VII.**

Oikawa’s very first memory goes just like this: he is 4 years old, and his mother is tugging him along by his right hand as they cross the street to visit the new neighbours. Oikawa decidedly does _not_ want to go meet the new neighbours, but his mother had promised to buy him milk bread if he accompanied her, and Oikawa has never been one to say no to milk bread. Fortunately for his mother, Oikawa doesn’t know what bribery is just yet.

The walk to the neighbour’s house is very short, and Oikawa does not remember most of it. What he does remember is this: Oikawa’s mother knocks on the door, and shortly after, a woman opens it, and smiles warmly at the sight of them both. His mother and the woman begin talking amicably, but Oikawa is disinterested. He’s peering into the small gap between the doorway and the woman’s legs. Inside, he sees a narrow hallway littered with a hundred different toys that Oikawa himself does not have. He wonders who they belong to.

“Hajime!” the woman calls out into her home, and Oikawa startles a little at the sound. He startles even more at the resounding _thud_ that follows, and the rush of footsteps after. Oikawa almost thinks there is a monster in the new neighbour’s home, his grip on his mother’s hand tightening just the slightest. And then the monster appears from behind the woman’s legs, and – well, Oikawa thinks he kind of does look a little bit like a monster anyway.

The woman gestures towards Oikawa and his mother. “This is Oikawa-san and Tooru-kun. They’re our neighbours from across the street. Say hello, Hajime.”

Hajime the Monster turns his gaze towards Oikawa’s mother before bowing his head slightly. Then Hajime the Monster turns his gaze towards Oikawa, and Fate starts feeling breathless all over again.

He’s about as tall as Oikawa is, hair black and spiky, and Oikawa notices all the bandages covering his arms and fingers. He even has one on his cheek, bright yellow with Godzilla patterned all over it, and Oikawa thinks it suits him. Hajime the Monster blinks owlishly at him, and Oikawa blinks back, curious. The length of a heartbeat, and then Oikawa’s mother nudges Oikawa slightly, and Oikawa lets go of her hand.

He holds it out towards Hajime the Monster instead. “I’m Oikawa Tooru,” he says, eyes wide with a wonder for things he is yet to know, and without hesitation, Hajime the Monster takes his hand.

“I’m Iwaizumi Hajime,” he says, earnest and solid, and Fate begins to hold its breath. For a moment, neither of them moves.

Then Iwaizumi Hajime tugs lightly on Oikawa’s hand. “Wanna go play?” he asks.

Oikawa doesn’t hesitate either; he nods, not waiting for his mother’s approval, and Iwaizumi pulls him inside.

Contrary to popular belief, the first time the two of them do something incredibly stupid is entirely Iwaizumi’s fault.

At the beginning of every summer since they met, Oikawa and Iwaizumi go and visit Oikawa’s grandparents in the countryside. Their house is located in a small village surrounded by mountains, and there’s only two vending machines in the entire village. Oikawa’s grandparents are old and kind, and like to give the two boys extra change to go and buy whatever they want at the convenience store, and by the third year of their friendship, everyone in the village already knows the two of them well. Iwaizumi finds himself looking forward to the visits more and more each year.

Currently, however, he’s in a bit of a predicament; Iwaizumi may or may not have just lost one Oikawa Tooru. Iwaizumi refuses to see this as his fault – yes, he was the one who suggested they explore the woods at the edge of the village, and Oikawa was all too willing to do so – but he had _not_ , in any way, told Oikawa that they should explore _alone_. The fact that they are currently separated is on _Stupidkawa_ , for wandering off on his own and getting _lost_. Iwaizumi huffs unhappily as he tries to retrace his steps. Truthfully – and this is something he will never admit to anyone – he just wants to make sure Oikawa is okay.

A quiet breeze tickles the hair behind his ear. Almost like a warm hand pulling him along, Iwaizumi feels a tugging on his heart, breathless and gentle, and Iwaizumi breathes in sharply. Curious and filled with childhood wonder, Iwaizumi decides to follow the tugging, up the hill, past the river, deeper into the woods he goes. It leads him back to one Oikawa Tooru.

When Iwaizumi finally finds Oikawa, he’s sitting in a heap on the ground, snot running down his face, eyes red from crying. Iwaizumi calls out to him. Oikawa looks up, Iwaizumi blurry through his tears, and when he realizes that his best friend has finally found him, he starts wailing even harder. Iwaizumi is so relieved he feels like crying himself.

But Iwaizumi doesn’t cry. Instead, he quietly crouches down next to Oikawa, who immediately reaches out and grabs his hand, like he can’t stand to be apart from Iwaizumi anymore. Oikawa’s fingers are short and stubby with childhood, cold no matter the weather, and Iwaizumi squeezes them lightly.

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa wails, stretching out the _chan_ , his voice breaking into a hiccup at the end. Even though Iwaizumi is here now, Oikawa cannot seem to stop crying. “You found me,” he says, wet and tearful, heavy with relief and the ache that comes with crying. Iwaizumi sighs a little, trying to hide his own relief, but hiding has never really mattered with Oikawa anyway.

_I’ll always find you_ , Iwaizumi doesn’t say, but he thinks Oikawa knows regardless. “Hey, ‘kawa,” he calls out instead, earnest and solid, and Oikawa’s wailing stops for just a second. He looks up curiously at Iwaizumi.

Iwaizumi grins, then, crooked and boyish, and tilts his head slightly to the right. “Look at that,” he says, and Oikawa turns to look; just beyond the trees, the forest opens up to an ocean of blue, bathing in light. Oikawa’s eyes widen, breathless, and before he can think to move Iwaizumi is already pulling him to his feet.

Hand-in-hand, the two make their way to the clearing. Their footsteps halt right at the heart of it, surrounded by blue flowers that almost glow in the sunlight. Ahead of them, a small pond sits tranquil and untouched. Almost instinctively, their fingers press closer together, and Iwaizumi cannot seem to remember how to breathe.

Then Iwaizumi notices a cut just above Oikawa’s elbow. “’kawa, you’re hurt,” he says, and Oikawa turns to look at him, and then at the cut, and his mouth forms an ‘O’ as if he hadn’t even realized it had been there himself. Iwaizumi pats around the pockets of his shorts for a band-aid, but finds that they are empty. He frowns. “We should go back,” he says, tugging on Oikawa’s hand. Oikawa stubbornly stays rooted to the spot.

“I wanna pick some flowers!” he says, indignant, the tell-tale signs of a pout forming on his lips. Iwaizumi sighs. At this point, 3 years down the road, he knows how difficult Oikawa can be if Iwaizumi tells him no. Maybe next time he’ll let Oikawa get lost for good (but of course, even as he thinks it, Iwaizumi knows he doesn’t mean it). Iwaizumi huffs, just for the sake of it.

“Fine,” he grumbles, brows furrowing, “but be quick, Stupidkawa.”

Oikawa lets out a little cheer. Iwaizumi huffs again, but he joins Oikawa anyway.

When Oikawa is (finally) satisfied with the heap of flowers in both his and Iwaizumi’s arms, they begin their journey back to the village. Just as they reach the edge of the canopy, where the light falls unobstructed, Iwaizumi feels a gentle wind tickle the hair behind his ear, like Fate letting go of a breath it had been holding. He thinks Oikawa feels it too. The two boys look back at the clearing, the length of a heartbeat, but nothing is there. The flowers sway in the wind.

Iwaizumi gets an odd feeling in his chest, like his heart is settling back inside his ribcage. But then Oikawa tugs on his hand, pulling him forward, and Iwaizumi forgets the feeling.

Later, when they return to Oikawa’s grandparents’ home, Oikawa’s grandmother is pleasantly surprised by all the flowers they brought back. “Oh, these _wasurenagusa_ are lovely!” she exclaims, in that soft tone that grandmothers have, as she takes the flowers from them. Oikawa immediately runs off to get himself a band-aid. Iwaizumi looks up at her curiously.

“What’s _wasurenagusa_?” he asks. A gust of wind blows through the open window of the living room, curtains billowing lazily in the air. Oikawa returns and nudges him, holding out a band-aid with UFOs on them. Iwaizumi rolls his eyes, but helps Oikawa put the band-aid on his cut anyway.

“They’re forget-me-nots,” Oikawa’s grandmother replies, smiling warmly as she places the flowers in a glass vase filled with water. She puts the vase on a table by the open window. Iwaizumi thinks the flowers look happy in the afternoon light.

The day after, Oikawa pulls Iwaizumi along, saying he wants to go back to the clearing, and after some grumbling and bribing, Iwaizumi finally agrees. But no matter how long they trudge through the woods that day, the clearing is nowhere to be seen. Oikawa and Iwaizumi give up when the sun starts slipping from the sky, and decide to move on to other adventures. They never find the clearing again.

It happens on a day at the beginnings of spring, their final day of junior high. Oikawa and Iwaizumi are on their way home from graduation, scrolls in hand, and they’re taking the long road home where they get to pass the river. That river, along with the entire path between their homes and Kitagawa Daiichi, hold a good three years of their lives, and neither Oikawa nor Iwaizumi say anything, but they feel the weight of growing older all the same. Hands rough and fingers delicate in their motions from hours and hours of practice, three losses against Shiratorizawa past, a whole future ahead of them. The two of them side-by-side as always.

They’d gone to the gym after the ceremony to play one last time and ended up screwing around for longer than they had initially intended. Now, as they’re slowly making their way home through muscle memory, the sun has already begun to set, painting the sky in swathes of red and golden light. There’s a strange tingling in Oikawa’s fingertips, and his eyes trail down to where their hands hang in the space between them, not close enough to touch, but between the two of them, distance has never mattered anyway; the knowledge of this settles Oikawa down, somewhat.

“Hey, look,” Iwaizumi calls out, stopping in his tracks. Oikawa stops just behind him. They’re standing on the bridge above the river, surface of the water glittering in the day’s last rays of sun. Iwaizumi turns to face the sunset, back to Oikawa, and a gust of wind blows between them. “Sky’s pretty,” he murmurs, just loud enough for Oikawa to hear. Oikawa’s gaze flickers briefly to the setting sun, before resting on the back of Iwaizumi’s head again. He smiles.

“That’s awfully sentimental of you, Iwa-chan,” he says, fingers curling into a loose fist by his side, trying to dispel the tingling. “We’re going to high school, you know, not a nursing home.”

The world seems to move in slow motion, then. Iwaizumi turns slightly to look at Oikawa, sun shining upon his back, and Oikawa half expects him to wrangle him in a headlock or something along those lines, but none such thing comes. Instead, Iwaizumi quirks an exasperated eyebrow, and smiles this crooked, boyish smile, skin of his cheeks glittering golden in the retreating sun. Something shifts in the air, a gust of wind blowing right through him, and Oikawa feels his heart take flight. There, on a small bridge that has withstood all of their childhood, rusted with river water, Oikawa Tooru falls in love, not for the first time, with one Iwaizumi Hajime. Fate feels its heart take flight, too.

“Fuck you,” Iwaizumi laughs, reaching out to ruffle Oikawa’s hair, and Oikawa lets him. The motion is gentler than Iwaizumi seems to intend. A bird’s nest now on Oikawa’s head, Iwaizumi doesn’t immediately pull away. Instead, his fingers, long and calloused with adolescence, hover just at the edge of Oikawa’s cheekbone, close enough that Oikawa can feel the heat radiating off of him. He seems to see something in Oikawa’s eyes, because his laugh melts into that smile again, crooked and boyish, and Oikawa feels his heart curl into a tight fist in his chest.

“Are you okay, Shittykawa?” Iwaizumi asks, tone so achingly gentle, and Oikawa doesn’t know what to say. Oikawa doesn’t know what to say because he is in love, and in this lifetime he has never been in love, and yet the very act of it feels so incredibly familiar to him, like he’s felt this way for years, for decades, for all of time – which, in all retrospect, shouldn’t be all that surprising anyway. They’ve known each other their whole lives, after all, and surely will continue to. Oikawa definitely hopes they do. Oikawa is looking at Iwaizumi, and Iwaizumi is looking at Oikawa, and he can’t imagine a life where he would want anything more than just this, than just them.

Iwaizumi’s fingers slide behind Oikawa’s ear, pushing back a strand of hair, and Oikawa shivers under his touch. “You look a little out of it,” Iwaizumi says, as if he isn’t the cause of all of this. Him with the boyish smile painted in swathes of red and gold.

“Perfect,” Oikawa says, breathless, breath-taking, half in a dream. “I’m perfect.”

Iwaizumi’s eyes soften, then. He retracts his hand, Oikawa’s heart perched on his ring finger, and Oikawa can’t take his eyes off of him. Oikawa can’t take his eyes off the way Iwaizumi is smiling, can’t take his eyes off the way Iwaizumi’s fingers curl slightly as he pulls away, can’t take his eyes off the way Iwaizumi can’t take his eyes off of him. Oikawa’s heart nuzzles into Iwaizumi’s open palm, like it belongs only in the other boy’s hands, and Oikawa doesn’t try to take it back. Doesn’t even really want to.

This is how Oikawa falls in love: the sun finally disappears over the horizon, and Iwaizumi takes Oikawa’s hand. “Let’s go home,” he says, pulling Oikawa forward like a tugging on the heart, and Oikawa follows suit.

Later, on another day, a little more down the road, so does Iwaizumi.

When Oikawa first tells Iwaizumi that he’s thinking of going to Argentina to pursue volleyball, Iwaizumi isn’t quite sure what to say.

A million questions flash through his mind: _How far is Argentina? Where will Oikawa stay? Does he even know the language? Can he eat the food there?_ and many, many more, and all of them amount to this: _will Oikawa be okay?_ Iwaizumi’s always been known to be earth-sure and steady, but he has his fears too. They always seem a bit bigger where Oikawa is concerned.

“You’re sure about this?” he asks instead, because for all Oikawa’s impulsiveness, Iwaizumi knows that he’s serious about this. Oikawa’s got his fears too, after all, and Argentina isn’t exactly small.

They’re in Iwaizumi’s bedroom, lying in bed facing each other, hands just shy of touching. The lights have been turned off, but the moonlight that shines through the windowpanes is just enough to reach them where they lay. Oikawa’s eyes dart down, a single flash of doubt, before he looks up at Iwaizumi again.

“You’re the only person I’ve told,” Oikawa says, quiet in the space between them. He reaches out for Iwaizumi’s hand. Their fingers intertwine like muscle memory, Oikawa’s cold no matter the weather, always stealing Iwaizumi’s body heat. Iwaizumi wonders how he’ll warm in Argentina. “I’d be a lot surer if you could tell me to go for it.”

Iwaizumi lets out a small puff of air, then. Oikawa is looking at him, eyes wide with fear and a wonder for things he is yet to know, and when Iwaizumi looks into them, he figures there’s nothing else he can really say.

“Dumbass,” he replies, squeezing Oikawa’s hand, “as if you ever listen to me.” Oikawa laughs at that, light and tinkling, and Iwaizumi takes the sound and presses it into his heart.

“Go for it,” he adds, offering a smile all crooked and boyish, and Oikawa’s laughter dies down. “You’ll never be satisfied if you don’t.”

Oikawa squawks at that, indignant, but Iwaizumi doesn’t miss the way his fingers squeeze, light as a butterfly’s touch, against Iwaizumi’s hand. “You make me sound like I’m greedy, Iwa-chan,” he pouts, brows scrunched together in mock-hurt. Iwaizumi gets the irresistible urge to kiss him.

“You _are_ greedy, Shittykawa,” Iwaizumi huffs, just for the sake of argument, and he reaches out to rustle Oikawa’s hair. Oikawa lets him. When Iwaizumi pulls his hand away, Oikawa is smiling at him in a way that catches the breath in his throat, too soft around the eyes, and Iwaizumi feels a tingling in his fingertips when they brush against Oikawa’s cheek.

“Hey, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa begins, and his voice in softer now, almost trembling. Iwaizumi loses his breath just a little. “There’s something else I need to tell you.”

Iwaizumi licks his bottom lip. “Is it as big as you going to Argentina?”

“Bigger.”

He gulps. “Okay,” he says, nodding slowly, squeezing Oikawa’s hand. Oikawa smiles a little at the gesture, crooked and too soft around the eyes. Fate feels its heart sigh in its chest.

Then Oikawa gets up, letting go of Iwaizumi’s hand, and goes to where his white and teal Aoba Johsai jacket hangs on the back of Iwaizumi’s chair by the desk. Iwaizumi sits up and watches him curiously, one eyebrow quirked, but otherwise says nothing. Oikawa rummages in his right pocket, and, after finding what he’s looking for, turns back towards Iwaizumi, his hands hidden behind his back. He doesn’t return to lie in bed; instead, he sits down on the floor next to it, looking up at Iwaizumi. Moonlight bounces off the locks of his hair, and Iwaizumi feels his heart thrashing against his ribcage.

Oikawa holds out his hand in the space between them. Held between his thumb and index finger is a small blue flower. _Forget-me-not_ , Iwaizumi remembers, a distant memory from their childhood. Oikawa twirls it in the air, catching the moonlight.

“I saw it on my way here from Wakamiya-san’s,” Oikawa explains, and Iwaizumi vaguely remembers that Oikawa had gone to Wakamiya-san’s bakery to buy milk bread before coming to Iwaizumi’s. “It reminded me of that clearing we found when we were 7. Do you remember, Iwa-chan?”

Iwaizumi nods, the memory playing in his mind. An ocean by their feet, the cut above Oikawa’s elbow. The tickle of a wind behind his ear, like farewell. It’s a barely noticeable thing, but Iwaizumi catches the tremble of Oikawa’s fingers in the space between them. Iwaizumi wants to reach out and smooth it away.

Then, almost like the world is moving in slow motion, Oikawa holds out the flower to Iwaizumi, as if in offering. He smiles, all soft around the eyes. “I’m in love with you, Iwa-chan,” he says, and Iwaizumi feels his heart take flight. Oikawa’s eyes are wide with fear and a wonder for things he is yet to know, and in the light of the retreating moon, Iwaizumi thinks that Oikawa looks ephemeral.

Their first kiss is tender and clumsy and uncertain, and Oikawa manages to tuck the forget-me-not behind Iwaizumi’s ear in the process. When they part, Oikawa giggles at Iwaizumi, and Iwaizumi blushes and grumbles and is far too happy to really care, pulling Oikawa in for another kiss. Their fingers tangle again, and in some ways nothing really changes; in some ways it feels like this was always meant to be. Moonlight falls over them, unobstructed, and Iwaizumi tugs Oikawa closer to his heart.

Oikawa isn’t the most organized person on this side of the world. He knows this, and the fact of it is absolutely kicking his ass. Speaking of which, his ass is beginning to _hurt_ , sitting on the floor of his bedroom since 9 in the morning having made almost zero progress. Iwaizumi is coming soon to help him. He’s gonna get his ass kicked again.

The digital clock by his bedside reads 11.34 A.M. All around him are cardboard boxes, some half-filled and most still empty, and all his clothes have been taken out of his closet and thrown in a heap on his bed. His mother keeps coming in every few minutes to dump a new pile of canned food on him. His glasses are askew atop his nose. It looks like a war zone.

There’s a knock on his door and Iwaizumi comes in, and it’s still ridiculous to Oikawa that they’ve lived most of their lives in each other’s homes and _still_ Iwaizumi knocks before he enters Oikawa’s room, and secretly Oikawa loves him for it. Iwaizumi is wearing a horrendous Godzilla graphic tee that Oikawa had absolutely forbidden him to buy and that he bought anyway just to spite him, and in his hands is a small black box, plain with no decoration. Oikawa peers at it curiously.

“Let me guess,” Iwaizumi says, landing unceremoniously on the floor right in front of Oikawa, the only space left unoccupied in Oikawa’s entire bedroom, “you’ve barely packed anything.” Iwaizumi’s knee knocks against Oikawa’s shin, their bodies slightly unaligned, and Oikawa presses into it.

“Iwa-chan,” he whines, “I’m dying.”

Iwaizumi snickers. Oikawa’s a little too in love to get angry.

“I got you something,” Iwaizumi says as Oikawa is picking between bringing his BEST SETTER mug (which is really just BEST GRANDMA crossed out with chipped red paint and SETTER scribbled over it, courtesy of the Aoba Johsai Volleyball Club) and his cat-ear mug that always pokes his eyes when he drinks. Oikawa looks up and Iwaizumi has the black box held out towards him, his ears tinted just the lightest pink. Oikawa breaks into a grin.

“You spoil me, Iwa-chan,” he teases, taking the box before Iwaizumi can regret his decision. Iwaizumi glares at him but otherwise says nothing. The box is light, and when he shakes it, it doesn’t make a sound. Oikawa opens it slowly, curious.

“Iwa-chan,” he breathes, feeling his heart light up. Inside are two matching wooden rings, and Oikawa takes one out with trembling fingers. He turns the band in the light, the wood glittering, and his eyes widen when he sees the carving on the inside of its curve. _一徹_ , spelled with the kanji from _Hajime_ and _Tooru_.

“ _Ittetsu_ ,” Iwaizumi says, blush reaching down to his neck, as he takes the ring in one hand and Oikawa’s hand with the other. His fingers are warm against Oikawa’s own. “It means stubborn and headstrong, like you,” he adds, smiling a little, crooked and boyish and glittering in the light, as he slips the band onto Oikawa’s ring finger. It’s a perfect fit.

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says again, breathless, breath-taking, half in a dream. His vision is blurry with tears. “Are you proposing to me?”

Iwaizumi sputters at that. “No, you idiot!” he says, and Oikawa laughs at how hard he blushes, feeling his heart take flight. A songbird twitters outside the window. “It’s–” Iwaizumi starts, and then stops again to collect himself. Iwaizumi refuses to look at him. “It’s for whenever you get lonely. So you’ll know I’m always with you.”

He murmurs the last part, shy and boyish, but it’s loud enough to pull at Oikawa’s heartstrings. Oikawa feels something light and tender bubble in his chest, and he laughs, tears blurring his vision. _Silly Iwa-chan_ , he thinks as he throws his arms around Iwaizumi’s neck, the two of them toppling to the floor. _I already know that._ But he thinks Iwaizumi knows that too.

Oikawa kisses Iwaizumi, again and again and again, laughing against his lips in delight. Iwaizumi smiles against him. When they pull away, just enough to look at each other, Iwaizumi has this soft look in his eyes, the same look he had when Oikawa first realized he was in love with him, and his hand reaches out to gently brush a lock of Oikawa’s hair behind his ear. Fate feels its heart soar in its chest.

“Ask me again,” Iwaizumi says, earnest and solid, and Oikawa’s brows scrunch up in confusion. “When you come back, ask me again about proposing.”

Oikawa feels his heart take flight.

The day Oikawa leaves for Argentina, he refuses to let go of Iwaizumi’s hand the entire trip to the airport. It’s ridiculous and dangerous because Iwaizumi is driving and he’s just got his license so he definitely shouldn’t be driving with only one hand on the steering wheel, but he doesn’t pull away, either. Oikawa’s fingers are cold against his own. Iwaizumi squeezes them lightly.

Once they arrive at the airport, Oikawa is full of nervous energy. He checks and double-checks his backpack, making sure he has everything he needs, including the picture of him, Iwaizumi, Matsukawa and Hanamaki at high school graduation that he’s never once pulled out of his wallet anyway. He triple-checks the ring on his finger.

Iwaizumi is a lot calmer than he’d expected to be. He had, after all, meant what he’d said when he told Oikawa to go for it, and he never would’ve said it if he didn’t believe Oikawa could do it. Oikawa is soaring, soaring, soaring as far as his wings can take him, and Iwaizumi is hopelessly in love with him for it. Oikawa is boundless and star-bound, and Iwaizumi thinks he’s never looked more beautiful than when he’s free.

But of course, Iwaizumi is only human. When Oikawa starts to pull away to go through security, Iwaizumi feels a breathless tugging in his chest. Without even really thinking, he reaches out to catch Oikawa’s fingers, tugging them lightly. Oikawa stops in his tracks and turns to him. He must see it, the flash of fear that Iwaizumi feels, because his eyes soften, then. Iwaizumi feels his heart catch in the spaces between his ribs.

“What’s wrong, Iwa-chan?” Oikawa asks, lacking his usual mischief. He curls his fingers slightly, just to press closer to Iwaizumi’s skin, and Iwaizumi has to take a moment to breathe. He doesn’t really know how to explain the feeling, like he’s let Oikawa slip through his fingers far too many times already. He doesn’t know where it comes from. Oikawa is looking at him the way he’s always looked at him, like Iwaizumi is earth-sure and larger than life, and Iwaizumi doesn’t know how to be any of those things right now. Iwaizumi isn’t sure how to be without Oikawa by his side.

“Make sure you don’t get lost out there,” he says instead, thinking back to 7 years old, Oikawa wailing Iwaizumi’s name, the clearing in the woods that they could never find after. _Wasurenagusa_. Oikawa tugs on his fingers, just the slightest pull, and Iwaizumi looks up at him. The sun is bright where it shines through the airport windows.

“Don’t worry, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa grins, and Iwaizumi doesn’t need to voice his fears because he knows Oikawa hears them anyway. “If I do, I know you’ll always find me.”

Iwaizumi lets out a small puff of air, then, feeling his heart settle back inside his chest. “Dumbass,” he smiles, crooked and boyish, thinking back to 7 years old and Oikawa’s short and stubby fingers reaching for his hand, “Of course I’ll always find you.”

Oikawa tugs again, harder this time, and pulls Iwaizumi into an embrace. The twin rings on their fingers glitter in the golden light. Oikawa buries his face into Iwaizumi’s neck, the length of a heartbeat, and whispers a quiet, trembling, “Don’t forget me, okay, Iwa-chan?”

When they pull away, Oikawa’s smile is shaky, his nose scrunched up with the effort to hold back tears. Iwaizumi squeezes Oikawa’s fingers one last time before letting go, smiling and holding back his own.

“How could I ever?” he says, earnest and solid, and Fate feels its heart settle back inside its chest.

**Author's Note:**

> i tried to make this as historically and factually accurate as possible, so i apologize for any mistakes. (if you happen to be a koto maker, i hope you can forgive me. i tried my best. if you are not, i recommend watching this [vid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8d80sVgLmY) just for the heck of it. it's a beautiful craft i have unfortunately not been able to convey)
> 
> i know it's not much, but this is the longest fic i've ever written, and it is my terrible, harrowing, godawful Baby, so please be kind to me. special thanks to all the friends who helped keep me sane throughout writing this fic! i am never writing anything ever again
> 
> if you wanna talk to me (gently, tenderly, softly) about this fic (or in general!) my twitter is @[iwaoiks](https://twitter.com/iwaoiks)!


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